Narratives and Neuroscience: The Stories We Tell Ourselves

I remember the exact moment that finally pulled me, head over heels, into the world of neuroscience. I was sitting in an Intro to Neuroscience class, listening to the professor talk about a gene responsible for regulating the level of the neurochemical serotonin in the brain. An alternative form of the gene, my professor explained, had been found to increase the likelihood for suicidal behavior.

Keyboards clicked and pencils scribbled around me in a flurry of movement, but to me, time froze. I remember an almost physical sensation of things clicking into place.

Losing my father to suicide a few years prior shattered my perception of the world. I spent years telling myself different stories about what had happened in an effort to understand the incomprehensible. As I dove deeper into neuroscience, learning about the roles of specific neurotransmitters and brain regions in mental health helped me begin to make sense of things.

For example, my father had suffered from delusions: firmly held false beliefs, unshakeable by logic or reason. Never spoken about or explained, the symptoms became sinister and strange, impossible for me to wrap my head around.

In my classes, though, I learned about the neurochemical dopamine, which plays a vital role in feelings of reward and motivation. I learned that dysregulation of this chemical can cause delusions and other psychotic symptoms. Researchers have hypothesized that overactivation of dopamine can cause neutral stimuli to take on disproportionate significance, leading to delusions about their meaning: like how an itch on the arm might transform into parasites crawling under the skin, or a passing stranger might morph into a stalker or assassin.

This new knowledge helped me understand why my father acted the way he had, but something still didn’t quite fit. In categorizing my life and the events of my past with biological language, I gained a new lens with which to tell the story of my past. Yet I felt that a piece of the puzzle was still missing.

It wasn’t until I took an English class unrelated to my major, called Writing to Heal, that I began to understand why.

To explain, I’ll start with a question: Who are you?

Take a moment. Really think about it. What comes to mind? Maybe you think of your current occupation, your hobbies, or the school you attend. Maybe you think of your hopes and dreams, or events that have happened in your life. Perhaps you consider the qualities you exhibit, the ways your friends or family describe you, or the values you hold.

 Combined, these elements are known as your “narrative identity:” the integrated sense of self that links your remembered past, your current self, and your imagined future. This identity is deeply intertwined with the stories you tell about yourself and the stories that others tell about you. I first learned this term through my assigned readings for the Writing to Heal class.

At the same time, through my neuroscience classes, I learned about all the ways in which narrative identity can fracture.

For example, schizophrenia, a disorder described by one of my professors as “a shattering of the self,” presents with symptoms such as hallucinations, delusions, and disturbances in emotion and mood. These symptoms change the way individuals with the disorder perceive the world around them, including warping their memories and perception of time. It’s no wonder, then, that these individuals experience impaired narrative identities and struggle to maintain a coherent “sense of self.”

Changes in narrative identity also manifest in other psychological disorders, such as depression. Clinical depression can lead to changes in the perception of time, leading the self-described life stories of depressed patients to follow a less linear, more disorganized path than a non-depressed group, and to focus more on the past.

Stressful life events, too, can disrupt narrative identity by overwhelming our ability to integrate an experience into our life stories. Take the example of my father’s suicide, an event that cleanly split my life into a “Before” and an “After” with a vast divide in between. The cohesion of my life story fell apart when past and present split.

This is where storytelling comes in. Telling our stories can serve as a tool to change the way we remember and emotionally process our experiences. In her book “Writing as a Way of Healing,” published in 2000, author Louise DeSalvo discusses this idea, describing imagination as “an emotional self-righting mechanism, akin to our body’s innate ability to heal wounds . . . our ability to take experience . . . and represent it after the fact in some kind of symbolic way” (p. 55).

This phenomena, explored by writers such as DeSalvo, has been described as “meaning-making” in the world of psychology.

More recently, researchers have begun to study why storytelling is so impactful. Scientists have hypothesized that expressive writing helps reorganize emotional memories, making them more coherent, organized, and meaningful. This can be especially helpful for reintegrating traumatic memories into a life story, as these kinds of memories tend to lack coherence and organization.

Indeed, the therapeutic potential of storytelling is being explored in clinical settings, through “narrative therapy,” a process by which psychotherapists direct patients to tell their life stories in a healing way.

Clinical trials have shown promising initial results of narrative therapy for mood disorders such as clinical depression. Though research about narrative therapy for psychotic disorders is still limited, one case study found that the therapy improved cohesive sense of self in a patient with schizophrenia, by helping her regain parts of her story outside of her illness and diagnosis.

I experienced the power of storytelling firsthand through my Writing to Heal class. Over the course of the semester, we wrote narrative essays about events in our lives. Through the writing process, I was able to weave my neuroscience knowledge into my life story, to untangle a few of the knots of my past and thread them into more cohesive narratives.

Through this process, I realized what had been missing.

Molecular neuroscience drew me in through the wonder of learning how a complex array of molecules can affect our behavior, despite existing on a scale faster and tinier than our minds can fully comprehend. Moreover, I found comfort in learning about these molecular mechanisms. They helped me to contextualize my father’s illness, to understand that he could have no more reasoned his way out of a delusion than I could spontaneously heal a broken leg.

And yet, it’s easy to lose sight of a larger picture when you’re studying the microscopic. Things like dopaminergic pathways and serotonin transport genes couldn’t encapsulate the whole of who my father was: an intelligent and stubborn man, a software engineer, a long-time Star Wars fan, an immigrant from Poland, a loving and patient parent.

That creative writing class showed me how to integrate the human component: the person my father was, the stories he constructed about his life and their rippling effects on my own life story.

It’s through stories, after all, that we understand our lives and the world around us. In the words of famous neurologist Oliver Sacks, “Each of us is a single narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us - through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions.”

So I’ll end by asking you another question: What are the stories that you tell yourself about your life?

Milena Kozlowska is a neuroscience researcher, writer, and artist who is endlessly fascinated by the brain and behavior. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Behavioral Neuroscience from Northeastern University and currently works as a Research Scholar in the Maimon Lab at NYU, exploring regenerative strategies for neurodegenerative disorders. When not in the lab, she can often be found hiking in the mountains or creating artwork inspired by neuroscience and nature.

Edited by Lauren Vetere, PhD

References

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This post was created without the use of LLMs or other AI tools.

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